A survey finds little in the way of job-related passion among
U.S. HR workers. Whose fault is it, and what can be done about it?

By Andrew R. McIlvaine

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Regardless
of where they work, most employees want to feel as if they're making a
difference and have the power to help change their organizations for the
better. Employees who actually do feel this way can best be described as "passionate"
-- they tend to embrace challenges that come their way as opportunities for
growth and learning. You won't find many of them in HR departments, however.

That's
according to the findings of a recent survey of 3,000 U.S.-based employees by
Deloitte Consulting's Center for the Edge, a San Jose, Calif.-based think tank
focused on innovation.

"Passion
tends to be catalyzed and sustained if you have a sense you're making a
difference in whatever environment you're in," says John Hagel, the Center's
co-chairman. Passionate people will naturally drive their organization to excel
and set up their employer for longer-term success, he says.

Only
7 percent of the respondents who worked in HR possess what Deloitte defines as "the
passion of the explorer," or those who view challenges as opportunities to
learn new skills and rapidly improve performance.

To
be fair to HR, employees who worked in accounting/finance and manufacturing had
identical passion levels, while those who worked in customer service had the
lowest of all, at 5 percent. The most-passionate workers were found in
management and marketing, at 17 percent and 16 percent, respectively.

Hagel
wasn't surprised that managers and marketers are more passionate: Their work
tends to involve autonomy and creativity, which are key ingredients for
job-related passion -- and which tend to be missing from many HR jobs, he says.

"HR
has been increasingly siloed as process managers, whether it's benefits
administration or training -- it's all about following standardized processes
and not making a difference,
and I expect that's part of the explanation," says Hagel.

When
a third or more of a typical HR department's staff is devoted to transactional
work, creativity is not encouraged -- especially when it comes to areas such as
compliance and payroll, says Stephen Joyce, a principal at Boston-based The
Hackett Group and leader of that firm's HR transformation and change practice.

It's
no coincidence the Deloitte survey found workers in customer service and HR
have very low rates of passion, he says.

"Historically,
much of what was hired for in HR was for customer service," says Joyce. "
'Employees are always right, do what you have to do to make them happy and
reduce the noise in the organization' -- but in order to advance in HR today,
you want more business partnering, which is not necessarily aligned with
customer service. To be a true business partner, sometimes you have to push
back a bit."

A
relatively straightforward explanation for the lack of passion in HR could be
money -- specifically, the lack of it, he says.

HR
-- like other functions such as finance and procurement -- has been repeatedly
asked to "do more with less" for the past five years. The Hackett Group's latest research on HR spending,
released this spring, found that companies are continuing to focus on cost
reduction in HR this year, with operating budgets expected to drop by 0.79
percent, on average, along with staff reductions of 1.89 percent. More than
half of all companies polled by Hackett said they expected to see HR budget
reductions this year, while another 26 percent said they expected to see no
changes.

These
numbers actually represent an improvement over the previous years, when average
cuts to HR's budget tended to be even deeper, says Joyce.

"The
impact of 'doing more with less' is that people tend to keep their heads down
and avoid taking risks," he says. Although avoiding risks could be good or
bad, depending on the context, this scarcity has also meant fewer opportunities
for the sort of training and investments that would allow HR staffers to do
higher-level work that might involve more creativity and autonomy, says Joyce.

Not
everyone agrees that HR is down in the dumps. Elissa O'Brien says Deloitte's
findings don't reflect what the Society for Human Resource Management has found
in surveys of its 250,000 members.

"Our
surveys have found when it comes to job satisfaction and engagement, there's a
high level of satisfaction among HR professionals," says O'Brien, director
of membership at Alexandria, Va.-based SHRM.

A
member survey conducted by the organization in 2011 found that HR professionals
reported being satisfied and "moderately engaged," with more than
eight out of 10 reporting being satisfied with their relationships with
coworkers, opportunities to use their skills and abilities, and the variety of
their work.

However,
the survey did uncover some gaps between what respondents rated as "very
important" to their job satisfaction and their actual level of
satisfaction with those factors. For example, a 48-percentage gap lay between
the importance respondents placed on communication between employees and senior
management and their satisfaction with it, while opportunities to use skills
and abilities had a 42-percentage point gap and relationship with their
immediate supervisors had a 31-percentage point gap.

Such
gaps are hardly unique to HR, says O'Brien. "People at the executive level
tend to have a clearer understanding of corporate strategy and deeper
relationships with company leaders than mid-level and low-level staff in any
department, not just HR," she says.

Regardless
of their rank, HR staffers at all levels deserve to feel some passion for their
work, says Hagel.

"We
run into a lot of pushback from critics who say it's unreasonable to expect
people who do 'routine and mundane tasks' to be passionate about their work,
but we disagree," he says.

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Hagel
cites Toyota Motor Co., which redefined assembly line work by telling employees
their job is to identify and solve problems on a regular basis, not just
install parts in cars. The company backed this up by installing switches at
each work station that enable any worker, at any time, to bring the entire line
to a halt should they encounter a problem they can't solve on their own.

"Even
in the most mundane of tasks, if you redefine the work to help people see how
they can make a difference, you can unleash passion," he says.

Were
he an HR leader, says Hagel, he would focus on "exception handling"
-- listening to the HR staff find out what sort of headaches that cause them
the most aggravation in the course of their daily work and help them find
creative ways to address those problems.

In
a few cases, Joyce says, HR leaders may find that many in their department are
unable or unwilling to create or sustain any level of job-related passion, in
which case they may need to make some difficult choices.

Many
HR departments -- particularly those where little hiring has been going on -- prefer
to promote from within, he says, which results in "a group of folks who
are in a world of customer service, compliance and regulation -- which creates
a challenge if you're looking for an influx of different viewpoints and ideas."

Joyce
describes the conundrum for HR as "the cobbler's children having no shoes."

"In
many cases, HR is trying to get other departments to use competency models and
other tools so they'll hire the best talent for their future needs, while
neglecting its own future needs," he says.

"When
I bring this topic up with HR leaders, they often say, 'Well, we haven't been
hiring for the past six or seven years,' " says Joyce. "But that
doesn't necessarily prevent you from having a strategy to bring in more talent
-- sometimes it means you've got to realign your organizational objectives and
realign your organization."

While
this could involve replacing some of your existing HR staffers, he says, it
could be useful to think of it in terms of the strategy employed by former
General Electric CEO Jack Welch, who popularized the "forced ranking"
method of promoting and firing employees based on their performance ratings.

"I
don't think you ever want to take a 'blanket' model like that to its logical
extreme -- you do need average people within your organization to keep the
trains running on time," Joyce says. "But you do need top-performing
talent in certain key roles -- there is a balance that leaders need to achieve."

O'Brien
agrees that HR leaders concerned about a lack of passion within their
departments should try and uncover any issues that may be standing in the way.
Yet she also encourages them to understand the difference between engagement
and passion.

"Engagement
comes from being in a company where you feel valued and that your voice is
heard, whereas passion is passion for our profession," she says. "I
would say our members are very passionate when it comes to their profession."